Are My Ideas Being Stolen? If So, What Then? 508
BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Interesting)
^This. In addition, I'd like to preemptively warn you away from worrying about "Java can be decompiled" or "Javascript shows the source code!" The bits and pieces of your code simply aren't that valuable. Either someone is going to steal it outright (in which case you've got them on Copyright Infringement) or they're already experienced enough to re-implement what you've done. And in the time it would take to pull your code out of context, modify it to work in a new environment, then attempt to disguise its origins, it would have been faster to re-implement the concept from scratch!
So in short, don't worry about the technology. Obtain your Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents as necessary. Those are your real protection.
It happens (Score:2, Interesting)
As an engineering student i know for a fact that one of my composite designs was used by my faculty adviser/mentor for a profitable research project.
What did i get? 8 bucks an hour as a lab assistant and the grade of a B for my troubles.
Get used to it.
You dont think the company you will eventually work for will profit off of all of your hard work and ideas? Think again
Its called industry... thats why they pay you
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
That's true, but it doesn't mean they're right. I had this great idea when I was in college, a program to convert sounds into images, edit the images and turn them back into sounds. I thought it was the greatest fucking idea ever. Yet when I would share my idea with other people they would go "who'd want to paint sounds up anyways?" or "it won't work".
I've been working on the idea for a few years in my spare time, and now I turned it into a commercial program [photosounder.com] which makes up for my main source of revenue and my other source of revenue comes from a consulting contract I got from getting an earlier FOSS implementation of it noticed by an engineer in some mining company.
The point being, no one would like your idea now, but wait a few years and your university will be glad to get money off what you made from it.
The only thing u can do... (Score:2, Interesting)
I had the same problem, when I saw a few of the other students work suddenly appearing on places like sourceforge, with people slightly changing code (naming conventions) but then you would have to say that this is a small price to pay to learn what you need to know. I followed this rule to a tee...
1- Kept my projects short and sweet to get the credit...and always tried to involve something in my project that I would need for my "real" project.
2- Described in short what I wanted to do, with slight differences on things I already knew, that way when it came to understanding the core of the logic, the person would have a hard time really knowing what I was working on.
3- Beat them to the punch, as much as I don't like sourceforge, too many rules for using your own code...etc....I do thank the stars they offer a package where I can upload my project for some to see(those i say is permissible) and gives me a level of protection for my source code.
I wish you luck, as this is only as good as the person getting their project to work.
If you must, ask them to sign a disclosure form, that they can legally grade you without you losing your work. If they really isn't anything worth while...they will sign it, if they think they might want to keep it, they say no...then you know to change your project to something smaller less like what u r trying to accomplish and more like a regular average Joe project.
Re:Don't worry about it (Score:5, Interesting)
I was also paranoid, but for slightly different reasons. I'm very open about my ideas and I worked in a lab as a graduate student that caught the attention of another university organization. They asked if we could meet for an informal "idea exchange," to which we agreed because, hey, we're all a part of the same university.
It turns out the organization had just been spun off the university into its own LLC and moved off campus. When we got to their office, the first thing they wanted from us was an NDA. We called bait-and-switch and asked them if they would mind signing an NDA for the ideas *we* would contribute. "That would defeat the purpose of this meeting," they told us.
So we signed, sat through a presentation of their work, gave no feedback and left. It wasn't that we were paranoid of them stealing our work, it was that we refused to get played like that.
Later, I spoke with an expert in my field, who is also an open-content guru, and I asked him how I could avoid things like that. He said, "Post everything you do to Sourceforge. Get it out there under GPL, or CC-non-profit license. If anyone wants to patented it, you'll have the evidence you need." (But that's not legal advice.)
I'm not sure if something like that would work at SUU (Go T-Birds!), since they could easily think *you* stole the code from Sourceforge, but it's an idea.
Check with the University (Score:3, Interesting)
Each University has their own policy on this, and will make it pretty easy to find. Most University policies that I've looked at look something like this:
'Any work that you submit as part of your course requirements is the property of the University. Any work that you do while working on a research project for the University is the property of the University.'
Not surprisingly, this is the basic premise of many employment contracts as well.
'Anything you make while working for us is automatically our property.'
There are always exceptions, of course, for work that is done by you, on your own time and equipment, that has nothing to do with your coursework/job.
I've never really felt that these policies are that obscene, and I think that if you take a few minutes to think about it objectively, you may feel the same. In no case is someone laying claim to anything that might fall out of your head, only the material that you will produce at the explicit request of someone else (either your instructor or employer).
Re:You think you can do anything? (Score:2, Interesting)
The nature of refinement is theft (Score:2, Interesting)
My personal experience is, if you have an idea you cannot complete yourself, it will be stolen. If the person you were working with needs to solve a problem, they will gravitate towards the best solutions they know, so theft of your best ideas is inevitable. Concentrate on being able to constantly reinventing ideas, and brainstorming new ones. If you try and hold on too tightly to your ideas, you're just dooming yourself to pain and disappointment.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Interesting)
I partly agree.
Most ideas are considered stupid by most people.
Even more ideas that are good, were already thought of and may even be on the market already.
But still there are the few really ground breaking ones.
If I had a dime for every one of my ideas stolen I'd be rich.
Here is where I disagree, execution is a matter of resources.
I had the very first audio every on most computer platforms. From digital audio on the Apple II, Lisa and Mac, C64, IBM PC and XT and even the Tandy Model 2 and 3.
I had the first PC digital audio products on the market the Sound Byte, then someone literally took my name trade marked and and sent me a cease and desists on the name! So I renamed it Audio byte. http://www.dnull.com/zebraresearch [dnull.com]
Then another company (first byte) reverse engineered my Digital Audio on the PC speaker and patented it, and tried to sue a number of game companies who also reverse engineered my code and used it. This was Intel Assembly language, almost as easy to reverse as JAVA. So many of these paid me and used my Prior Art to toss out the patent suits.
But the kicker was after 3 years and selling some 5000 units at $30 each, Creative Labs came out with an inferior product for $115 and sold 47,000 units in there first month. Past us by like we were standing still. I found out that the same VC we pitch financed them while not financing me. And there plan used us as an example of market feasibility!
So much for execution. It's all a matter of resources. If you don't start off with enough money, and try to boot strap from sales like I was doing, you going to get killed if it's a really important product.
I have repeatedly had this happen with different ideas. Many I did execute on and for some was even selling and making a profit.
* Wearable computers with VR goggles 1984
* Hand held Oscilloscope 1984
* VOIP (internet phone calls) in 1987
* Streaming internet video 1988.
* 13000 streaming video viewers (VQ) with 384 video servers on SUN Microsystems network 1990
* Online Banking for Wells Fargo, 1992
* Livecam (JPEG, GIF, and MPEG1 & 2, modified H.261) 1994
* The CDN where I built the first on for video in 1994. IN 1997 we had over 1M simultaneous views at 56K. One of the largest consumers of Bandwidth on the Internet, and no one knew who we were, because it was adult.
I can directly trace back to specific individuals where Genutity's Hopscotch network and Digital Islands CDN directly copied what I was doing!
Peer1 that host Youtube is now using one of my methods that I pioneered for CDN.
* load balancing of internet servers 1995
* Caching web servers 1996
* TCP/IP Selective Acknowledgment implemented in my ECIP. 1996 http://www.ecip.org/ [ecip.org]
* Streaming H.263/MPEG4 video and MP3 1996/1997
* the first Stand alone IP Camera 1996
* Fanless servers to improve reliably in our CoLo's 1997 (used heat pipes on CPU, HD and PS)
* The first CCTV DVR 1997 done in Partnership with Korean company. Also included the first multichannel(16 input) video capture board.
* Cell processors & Blade servers http://www.enumera.com/ [enumera.com]
1999
* silent computers * computer cooling in 2002
My new stuff I am keeping under wraps now till I can get better resources lined up.
I am not listing these to brag, but to show how much effort I have put in over the past 20 years, with great technical success but only partial business success.
It's always boiled down to one thing, lack marketing budget. Lack of money to manufacture. Lack of the "right connections" to raise money or make large sales because I wasn't part of the good old boys/rich kids club. There is a class system in this country whether you believe it or not.
Almost every one of these ideas I filed or tried to file a patent on, then ran out of money to comp
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but this is not a new idea either. Metasynth [uisoftware.com] does more-or-less the same thing, and to a lesser degree IRCAM's AudioSculpt does too. It's very rarely the idea itself that's important, but the implementation.
Software is not a product, it's a process.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Interesting)
God help us.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, absolutely do this. I've done this at almost every job except for my current (but I'm a principle developer and have rights through my patents).
Most developers don't have worries anyway - since most are simply writing business & service software. Very few people are developing real products that can garner patent protection.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Interesting)
I was 19 or 20 when this happened, I really didn't have a clue. Now I would just have called his bluff.
Just scraping the $2000 together to get custom R2R ladders resistor modules made to produce the units took months. On the $28K per year I was making while at Stanford University as a Life Science Research Assistant things were tight.
Remember I made these things to try to get more money, there wasn't any extra for lawyers.
Even the first prototypes were made by soldering 18 loose resistors in to a DB25 connector, burning our finger the whole time. We made a few hundred this way, I even made several aluminum jigs to hold the resistors while we soldered them together.
This is the product we put out!
http://www.dnull.com/zebraresearch/images/audiobyte-pack1m.jpg [dnull.com]
I really needed the $10K to make professional packaging to get it in to Fry's electronics. We knew the founders of Fry's but just couldn't afford real packaging.
This package was made from some Ace Hardware gutter lining plastic that was heat sealed using a home made heat sealer I made from some toaster parts, wood and fiberglass!
My total cost per unit was $5 and we sold for $30.